Latino Review: Hollywood Yamato/Star Blazers Film Hires Writer

Skydance Media plans film as Christopher McQuarrie’s next after Mission: Impossible

In an interview with media news website Latino-Review on Saturday, Skydance Media CEO David Ellison revealed that the live-action Hollywood film adaptation of the Star Blazers (Space Battleship Yamato) anime has hired on screenwriter Zach Dean (Deadfall) to pen the film’s script. He also confirmed that director Christopher McQuarrie is still working on the film.

Ellison also added that Skydance is working on making the project McQuarrie’s next one after the next Mission: Impossible film. Skydance Productions, the Hollywood company behind Tom Cruise‘s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and Brad Pitt’s World War Z, is producing the project. In 2014, the Sports Nippon newspaper reported that the film was slated to open as soon as 2017 under the Star Blazers title. At the time, Shoji Nishizaki, the adopted son of the late Yamato producer Yoshinobu Nishizaki, was listed as the executive producer.

Skydance negotiated for the rights for the adaptation in 2011.

Star Blazers is the dubbed and partly rewritten adaptation of Yoshinobu Nishizaki and Leiji Matsumoto‘s Space Battleship Yamato space opera anime franchise. In the anime, Earth is dying from constant attacks by an alien race known as the Gamilans. The survivors launch the Argo (the Yamato in the original Japanese version), a battleship equipped with experimental alien technology, in a desperate bid to break through the Gamilan blockade and retrieve technology that will allow them to resurrect Earth before the radiation kills all survivors on Earth.

A live-action film remake of the original Space Battleship Yamato anime opened in Japan in 2010. In addition to a string of sequels, the franchise spawned the Space Battleship Yamato 2199 re-imagining. The re-imagining premiered in Japan as a series of seven movies shown theatrically in Japan from 2012 to 2013, each containing four episodes’ worth of runtime (except for the first movie, which only showed the first and second episode). The series then began airing on Japanese television in April 2013. A compilation film of the series opened in Japan in October 2014 with the title Uchū Senkan Yamato 2199: Tsuioku no Kōkai (Space Battleship Yamato 2199: Voyage of Remembrance), and a new film that continues the story opened in Japan in December 2014, with the title Uchū Senkan Yamato 2199: Hoshi-Meguru Hakobune (Space Battleship Yamato 2199: Star-Voyaging Ark). The re-imagining is inspiring a sequel seven-part film series titled Uchū Senkan Yamato 2202: Ai no Senshi-tachi (Space Battleship Yamato 2202: Warriors of Love or Star Blazers 2202: Warriors of Love). The first film opened in Japan on February 25, and the second film will open on June 24.